Escape Room the Game – Space Station

Space Station is the first expansion pack that we’ve played for Escape Room the Game and it utilises the chronology decoder, keys and hint decoder from the base pack.

When you finally regain consciousness, you’re staring straight at the bloodshot eyes of a dead cosmonaut floating by… Becoming an astronaut was your lifelong dream. You had no idea that a dream could turn into a nightmare this quickly. Help was almost literally a million miles away. It was supposed to be a routine operation. You trained for entering the space station so many times and nothing ever went wrong but this time nothing went right… You and your team were very excited about taking over this Russian space station for the next few months. You thought you were prepared for just about anything, but nothing could prepare you for this. Your ears are still ringing from the explosion and you still feel a bit dizzy, but your team is looking at you to take action. All communication with earth is down, so there will be no help from that end.

Everybody is still in shock, not only from the explosion but because of the three dead Russians floating in front of you. They are not only dead Russian cosmonauts, they were supposed to be your guides in the space station and even more importantly, your interpreters. They were supposed to show you the ropes in the MIR II for a few weeks and help you to translate all the essential stuff. Everything around you is in Russian: the instruction manuals, the signs, the posters. Even the computer voice on the intercom is in Russian and it seems to repeat itself a couple of times: ‘Kislorod postavka shest’desyat odin minut, Kislorod postavka shest’des odin minut’. You grab your little Russian dictionary and translate as best you can. You’re pleasantly surprised how quickly you find the translation but the outcome is less pleasant ‘oxygen supply 61 minutes’.

You quickly tell your team what the new situation is and that the rescue shuttle is your only chance of survival. You know how to activate the computer, but then the computer asks to enter a password… The intercom voice speaks again saying: ‘Shest’desyat minut’, you know right away that ‘shest’desyat’ means sixty. You just learned your first word of Russian…

I always loved the idea of being an astronaut and now my time has come.

The game is in three parts, going into the game we decided to not to re-read the game rules. My advice, re-read the game rules if you’ve had a little bit of a break from this series. We sailed through part one though I can understand how easy it could be to get a bit stuck here. Part two we found the trickiest, the wording on the intro to this part could easily be interpreted not quite correctly, which had me going in circles for a good 5 minutes. Having got most of the puzzles in the second part, we missed a rather key bit of information due to not reminding ourselves of the game rules. This did caused us some frustration which could have easily been avoided (make sure you know the game rules.) The third part we found relatively simple, though it does need a little bit of general knowledge to help you along. I liked the puzzles that we had in this game, some of them did require a good bit of brain power to work through them.

Some items you get early in the game are required in the later stages, we did get a little tidy happy at one point and ended up having to dig back into previous parts to find something we previously used and needed again. I really enjoyed the selection of puzzles in this game. Playing as a pair there were times were we needed to work together, and times we could really take ownership of a puzzle and work in parallel with each other. The game box suggests that you need a minimum of 3 players and a maximum of 5, personally this is very do-able with two players, and for very experiences escape game player you could get through this game solo if you work efficiently, though it would be a challenge. The game I think would work well with 3 players. Having 4 or 5 players I think you risk not having enough individually to do.

We escaped with 00:48 minutes left in the clock having got one incorrect code which deducted us a minute (we seem to be playing a lot of games at the moment which penalise us for incorrect guesses!) I really enjoyed this game as a break from the unlock! Card only format we’ve played quite intensely recently. One thing I really appreciate from escape room the game is that you can Download and re-print any perishable material on the game which allows you to lend the game out to friends. We had lent the base pack out to friends previously and will undoubtedly be lending it back to them with this expansion pack for them to play. It’s starting to feel like we are running an escape game library!

You can buy the expansion packs for Escape Room the Game on Amazon for around £10-13 each, their availability is a bit trickier with the games often being out of stock so you need to keep an eye out. I firmly rate the value of them at c.£13 a game, it’s good entertainment (especially during lockdowns) for two people for an hour, and even out of lockdowns can help you get your escape game fix between playing physical rooms. If you have friends you are lending games to, this helps spread the cost of your fun even more if they can lend some back.

The game is self rated 4/5 for difficulty, when I compare to other games that we’ve played I don’t quite agree but then, I think to be scoring 4/5 on difficulty it needs to be pretty tough (I’m not yet sure what get’s 5/5 difficulty for me, maybe it’s the day we get locked in!) Overall, I’m giving it a very respectable 3.5/5 stars.

Difficulty 3.5/5

Atmosphere 2/5

Variety 3.5/5